Phys.org news tagged with:atmospheric modelshttp://phys.org/
en-usPhys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine.Climate models disagree on strength of carbon land sink across northern EurasiaIn a new assessment of nine state-of-the-art climate model simulations provided by major international modeling centers, Michael Rawlins at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues found broad disagreement in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) annually sequestered in tundra and boreal ecosystems of Northern Eurasia, a vast, understudied region of the world.http://phys.org/news/2015-07-climate-strength-carbon-northern-eurasia.html
Environment Tue, 28 Jul 2015 09:00:02 EDTnews357285052NASA balances water budget with new estimates of liquid assetsMany pressing questions about Earth's climate revolve around water. With droughts and flooding an ongoing concern, people want to know how much water is on the move and where it is going. To help answer those questions, a new NASA study provides estimates for the global water cycle budget for the first decade of the 21st century, taking the pulse of the planet and setting a baseline for future comparisons.http://phys.org/news/2015-07-nasa-liquid-assets.html
Earth Sciences Wed, 08 Jul 2015 08:40:01 EDTnews355561876Solving corrosive ocean mystery reveals future climateAround 55 million years ago, an abrupt global warming event triggered a highly corrosive deep-water current through the North Atlantic Ocean. The current's origin puzzled scientists for a decade, but an international team of researchers has now discovered how it formed and the findings may have implications for the carbon dioxide emission sensitivity of today's climate.http://phys.org/news/2015-05-corrosive-ocean-mystery-reveals-future.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 11 May 2015 12:33:43 EDTnews350566411Study finds that soil carbon may not be as stable as previously thoughtIncreased plant growth caused by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is associated with higher rates of carbon dioxide release from soil. If rising carbon dioxide enhances soil carbon storage at all, the effect will be small. Soil carbon may not be as stable as previously thought, and soil microbes exert more direct control on carbon buildup than global climate models represent.http://phys.org/news/2015-04-soil-carbon-stable-previously-thought.html
Environment Thu, 16 Apr 2015 07:39:19 EDTnews348388748Higher resolution alone will not fix climate models' daytime precipitation cycle problemsUsing increased computing power, climate modelers divide Earth's atmosphere into smaller areas so that global models can represent more details in the climate. But how do these large models behave with this higher resolution? Using a regional atmospheric model as a proxy for upcoming high-resolution global climate models, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that global models carry many biases into the higher resolution regional output despite its finer detail. The research identified certain tradeoffs that highlight modeling challenges when moving from coarse to high-resolution simulations.http://phys.org/news/2015-04-higher-resolution-climate-daytime-precipitation.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 13 Apr 2015 08:19:00 EDTnews348131932Heat's role in the Madden-Julian oscillationTropical monsoons in Indonesia and floods in the United States are both provoked by the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO), a process that results in pulses of clouds and precipitation moving eastward around the globe at about 5 meters per second. Despite the MJO's importance, global models often struggle to simulate the oscillation accurately. Researchers showed that MJO simulations are most sensitive to the existence of lower level heating in the atmosphere.http://phys.org/news/2015-04-role-madden-julian-oscillation.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 13 Apr 2015 06:00:01 EDTnews348123037Global warming slowdown: No systematic errors in climate modelsSceptics who still doubt anthropogenic climate change have now been stripped of one of their last-ditch arguments: It is true that there has been a warming hiatus and that the surface of the earth has warmed up much less rapidly since the turn of the millennium than all the relevant climate models had predicted. However, the gap between the calculated and measured warming is not due to systematic errors of the models, as the sceptics had suspected, but because there are always random fluctuations in the Earth's climate. Recently, Jochem Marotzke, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, and Piers M. Forster, a professor at the University of Leeds in the UK, have impressively demonstrated this by means of a comprehensive statistical analysis. They also clearly showed that the models do not generally overestimate man-made climate change. Global warming is therefore highly likely to reach critical proportions by the end of the century - if the global community does not finally get to grips with the problem.http://phys.org/news/2015-02-global-slowdown-systematic-errors-climate.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 02 Feb 2015 11:25:41 EDTnews342098732New research highlights the key role of ozone in climate changeMany of the complex computer models which are used to predict climate change could be missing an important ozone 'feedback' factor in their calculations of future global warming, according to new research led by the University of Cambridge and published today (1 December) in the journal Nature Climate Change.http://phys.org/news/2014-12-highlights-key-role-ozone-climate.html
Environment Mon, 01 Dec 2014 11:00:01 EDTnews336653212NASA computer model provides a new portrait of carbon dioxideAn ultra-high-resolution NASA computer model has given scientists a stunning new look at how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere travels around the globe.http://phys.org/news/2014-11-nasa-portrait-carbon-dioxide.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 17 Nov 2014 17:18:38 EDTnews335467109Study shows increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is lower than predicted because of plantsA team of researchers in the U.S. claims that climate models used to predict the rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are approximately 17 percent too high because they incorrectly approximate how much CO2 plants pull from the atmosphere. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes how they studied the ability of plants to absorb increased amounts of CO2 and discovered that they are capable of pulling more out of the atmosphere than has been previously thought and the difference is approximately equal to the error difference reported by simulation models.http://phys.org/news/2014-10-co2-atmosphere.html
Environment Tue, 14 Oct 2014 09:00:01 EDTnews332487598Causes of California drought linked to climate changeThe atmospheric conditions associated with the unprecedented drought currently afflicting California are "very likely" linked to human-caused climate change, Stanford scientists say.http://phys.org/news/2014-09-california-drought-linked-climate.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 29 Sep 2014 16:05:08 EDTnews331225498'Space bubbles' may have aided enemy in fatal Afghan battleIn the early morning hours of March 4, 2002, military officers in Bagram, Afghanistan desperately radioed a Chinook helicopter headed for the snowcapped peak of Takur Ghar. On board were 21 men, deployed to rescue a team of Navy SEALS pinned down on the ridge dividing the Upper and Lower Shahikot valley. The message was urgent: Do not land on the peak. The mountaintop was under enemy control.http://phys.org/news/2014-09-space-aided-enemy-fatal-afghan.html
Space Exploration Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:14:04 EDTnews330696835New study shows how conversion of forests to cropland affected climateThe conversion of forests into cropland worldwide has triggered an atmospheric change that, while seldom considered in climate models, has had a net cooling effect on global temperatures, according to a new Yale study.http://phys.org/news/2014-09-conversion-forests-cropland-affected-climate.html
Environment Mon, 08 Sep 2014 14:05:44 EDTnews329403937Sun's activity influences natural climate changeFor the first time, a research team has been able to reconstruct the solar activity at the end of the last ice age, around 20,000-10,000 years ago, by analysing trace elements in ice cores in Greenland and cave formations from China. During the last glacial maximum, Sweden was covered in a thick ice sheet that stretched all the way down to northern Germany and sea levels were more than 100 metres lower than they are today, because the water was frozen in the extensive ice caps. The new study shows that the sun's variation influences the climate in a similar way regardless of whether the climate is extreme, as during the Ice Age, or as it is today.http://phys.org/news/2014-08-sun-natural-climate.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 18 Aug 2014 09:37:40 EDTnews327573451Cassini tracks clouds developing over a Titan sea(Phys.org) —NASA's Cassini spacecraft recently captured images of clouds moving across the northern hydrocarbon seas of Saturn's moon Titan. This renewed weather activity, considered overdue by researchers, could finally signal the onset of summer storms that atmospheric models have long predicted.http://phys.org/news/2014-08-cassini-tracks-clouds-titan-sea.html
Space Exploration Tue, 12 Aug 2014 18:00:37 EDTnews327085225MIPT-based researcher models Titan's atmosphereA researcher from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Prof. Vladimir Krasnopolsky, who heads the Laboratory of High Resolution Infrared Spectroscopy of Planetary Atmospheres, has published the results of the comparison of his model of Titan's atmosphere with the latest data.http://phys.org/news/2014-07-mipt-based-titan-atmosphere.html
Space Exploration Thu, 24 Jul 2014 07:10:08 EDTnews325402952OCO-2 data to lead scientists forward into the past(Phys.org) —NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, which launched on July 2, will soon be providing about 100,000 high-quality measurements each day of carbon dioxide concentrations from around the globe. Atmospheric scientists are excited about that. But to understand the processes that control the amount of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, they need to know more than just where carbon dioxide is now. They need to know where it has been. It takes more than great data to figure that out.http://phys.org/news/2014-07-oco-scientists.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 21 Jul 2014 06:34:57 EDTnews325143279Promising new approach allows global and regional climate models to share process informationA new climate modeling approach that combines a detailed regional model with a more wide-ranging global model was developed by a team of researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in collaboration with the University of Wyoming. This approach, described in a recent article in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, improves the way models represent atmospheric particles, clouds, and particle-cloud interactions and how they vary at regional and local scales. The approach minimizes inconsistencies in how process information is parameterized—that is, translated into simplifications that well represent process complexity.http://phys.org/news/2014-06-approach-global-regional-climate.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 30 Jun 2014 07:40:01 EDTnews323329371New study suggests more and longer atmospheric stagnation events due to global warming(Phys.org) —A new study conducted by researchers at Stanford University has led to findings indicating that much of the world can expect to have more atmospheric stagnation events as the future unfolds. In their paper published in Nature Climate Change, the researchers describe how they ran a variety of computer models that took into account a continued increase in greenhouse gas emissions—they report that taken together, the models predict that approximately 55 percent of the world's population can expect to be impacted by future stagnation events.http://phys.org/news/2014-06-longer-atmospheric-stagnation-events-due.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 23 Jun 2014 10:30:36 EDTnews322738224Tagging tiny particles in turbulent clouds(Phys.org) —Hitching tiny atmospheric particles to cloud formation enables climate models to represent the particles' effects on convective storm systems. Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and collaborators at North Carolina State University and Scripps Institution of Oceanography implemented a new modeling approach linking particles and convection in a regional climate model to capture an improved view of turbulent storm clouds. Their approach was verified through investigation of the impacts of these aerosol particles on the East Asian summer monsoon where convective storms are frequent.http://phys.org/news/2014-05-tagging-tiny-particles-turbulent-clouds.html
Earth Sciences Fri, 30 May 2014 06:00:01 EDTnews320647775Unclouding our view of future climateIf we had a second Earth, we could experiment with its atmosphere to see how increased levels of greenhouse gases would change it, without the risks that come with performing such an experiment. Since we don't, scientists use global climate models.http://phys.org/news/2014-05-unclouding-view-future-climate.html
Earth Sciences Thu, 22 May 2014 10:12:31 EDTnews319972336New model shows moderate resource use, reduced economic inequality keys to sustainabilityA new analytical tool adds human factors to a widely-used biological model of how animal populations interact, suggesting that human societies can reach a steady state that is sustainable when they do not over-deplete natural resources and avoid extreme economic inequality.http://phys.org/news/2014-04-moderate-resource-economic-inequality-keys.html
Environment Wed, 02 Apr 2014 12:59:58 EDTnews315662384Testing an atmospheric model's radiative flux sensitivities at the top of the atmosphereFor the first time, scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory conducted a comprehensive sensitivity study of 16 selected parameters in a popular atmospheric model to analyze their effect on the flux of energy at the top of the atmosphere. They found that cloud parameters—especially the one changing cloud ice to snow—are the primary culprits affecting energy flux among these parameters. They also found that pollution and natural emissions particles affect the atmosphere more at regional than global scales. Their analysis provides evidence that interactions among the selected parameters have little influence on the total mean net radiant flux in most global regions.http://phys.org/news/2014-02-atmospheric-radiative-flux-sensitivities-atmosphere.html
Earth Sciences Tue, 04 Feb 2014 06:20:01 EDTnews310716517Cloud mystery solved: Global temperatures to rise at least 4C by 2100Global average temperatures will rise at least 4°C by 2100 and potentially more than 8°C by 2200 if carbon dioxide emissions are not reduced according to new research published in Nature. Scientists found global climate is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than most previous estimates.http://phys.org/news/2013-12-cloud-mystery-global-temperatures-4c.html
Earth Sciences Tue, 31 Dec 2013 09:31:37 EDTnews307704684The importance of aerosol research: A Q&A with Alex GuentherAlex Guenther is a renowned atmospheric and ecosystem scientist, as well as a Laboratory Fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and lead scientist for atmospheric aerosol science at EMSL. He recently took time while traveling in Brazil to answer some questions about the importance of atmospheric aerosol studies.http://phys.org/news/2013-12-importance-aerosol-qa-alex-guenther.html
Earth Sciences Mon, 23 Dec 2013 08:39:22 EDTnews307010189Earth's sensitivity to climate change could be 'double' previous estimates, say geologistsThe sensitivity of the Earth's climate to CO2 could be double what has been previously estimated, according to a statement issued by the Geological Society of London.http://phys.org/news/2013-12-earth-sensitivity-climate-previous-geologists.html
Earth Sciences Tue, 10 Dec 2013 09:20:03 EDTnews305887654Image: A portrait of global windsHigh-resolution global atmospheric modeling provides a unique tool to study the role of weather within Earth's climate system. NASA's Goddard Earth Observing System Model (GEOS-5) is capable of simulating worldwide weather at resolutions as fine as 3.5 kilometers.http://phys.org/news/2013-11-image-portrait-global.html
Earth Sciences Fri, 22 Nov 2013 07:08:15 EDTnews304326486Amazon rainforest more able to withstand drought than previously thoughtNew research suggests that the Amazon rainforest may be more able to cope with dry conditions than previously predicted. Researchers at the University of Exeter and Colorado State University used a computer model to demonstrate that, providing forest conservation measures are in place, the Amazon rainforest may be more able to withstand periods of drought than has been estimated by other climate models.http://phys.org/news/2013-11-amazon-rainforest-drought-previously-thought.html
Environment Thu, 14 Nov 2013 10:00:59 EDTnews303645638Month-long study by UH targets improved air quality forecastingUniversity of Houston (UH) professors and students are taking part in an air quality study that will help scientists understand how to better interpret and forecast air quality using satellite data and numerical models.http://phys.org/news/2013-09-month-long-uh-air-quality.html
Environment Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:44:32 EDTnews299425460First-time measurements in Greenland snowpack show a drop in atmospheric co since 1950sA first-ever study of air trapped in the deep snowpack of Greenland shows that atmospheric levels of carbon monoxide (CO) in the 1950s were actually slightly higher than what we have today. This is a surprise because current computer models predict much higher CO concentrations over Greenland today than in 1950. Now it appears the opposite is in fact true.http://phys.org/news/2013-09-first-time-greenland-snowpack-atmospheric-1950s.html
Earth Sciences Tue, 17 Sep 2013 10:03:52 EDTnews298631013